Rie Ito

I am currently studying sociology in the master's course at the University of East Anglia and pursuing the International Educational Development M.S.Ed. (IEDP) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) to play a leading role in education reform, responsible for determining policy. Through the education study at Penn that gave me an offer letter, I want to go beyond policy-limited issues of the chain of child poverty by more comprehensively utilizing my intellectual ability as a social security specialist in Japan and as a scholar in Development Studies, the UK.
My long-term career objective is to develop quality education for children living in poverty. I want to join education policymaking by working with governments and international organizations, including the UNDP, after IEDP at Penn. I believe in education as a powerful tool for quality life, which can help children develop their capabilities and autonomy, and helped me fight poverty and find a pathway to social inclusion from my own abusive dysfunctional family of low socioeconomic status.
In my 22-year career as a public officer in Japan, I engaged in social security policymaking and international research projects with OECD. Through this project, I revealed only 20 percent of the global population enjoyed adequate social security coverage and children living in poverty were not eligible for minimum social security. In 2017 and 2019, I contributed to publishing ‘Pensions at a Glance: OECD and G20 Indicators’ in collaboration with the Deputy Director of Employment, Labor and Social Affairs at the OECD. This worldwide research improved my comparative analysis skills, showing me the most vulnerable children in developing countries, who were excluded from social security schemes that ensure quality education. This research experience motivated me to engage in Development Studies at UEA to examine complex social structures excluding vulnerable children.
My research experience at UEA improved my contextual analysis skills. To examine the local realities of children living in poverty, I applied sociological concepts and theory to practical development issues and unveiled their nuanced, complex, and contextual problems. In my dissertation, this approach enabled me to identify multi-layered social and educational exclusion against working children and possible dilemmas between education and child work. I conducted a case study analysis on children working alongside schooling, focusing on the small-scale fishing sector, which has been ignored by mainstream research. Against children’s expectations, schooling was too expensive, unpleasant, of poor quality, and seemed unlikely to lead to quality jobs, and thus they dropped out of school, disappointed with formal education. This research experience has laid my foundation to deeply understand the current challenges facing marginalized children. This is crucial to meet their real demands in policymaking. Simultaneously, I keenly feel the necessity of strategic leadership and management skills in education reform, which are essential if schools are to continue improving, overcome the challenges, and promote social inclusion for vulnerable children.